Many in the Digg community were cautiously optimistic when the company was acquired recently by betaworks and rebranded as Digg v1.

Their worst fears were confirmed when the site relaunched without user profiles; Digg logins; or comments that aren’t submitted through Facebook. In short, Digg became a provincial outpost of Facebook and that did no sit well with Diggers.

Forbes.com blogger Neal Rodriguez summed up the common sentiment in a blistering rant titled, Betaworks Burns $500,000 Upon Dig v1 Launch. Rodriguez didn’t hold back anything in his description of the new site:

Wow! I’ve witnessed digital genocide. Upon the launch of the new Digg, former Diggers practically lost all affiliation with the fallen social news empire.

While genocide is a pretty strong word, betaworks definitely laid waste to an established online community and, seemingly, doesn’t seem to care much either way.

Money (Not) Well Spent

Betaworks reportedly spent around half a million dollars redesigning Digg and that money appears to have been largely wasted on a site that’s been completely hollowed out.

So what’s the future for the social bookmarking site? Without their core users it looks like they’ll be starting from scratch.